Pumpkins flourish despite rains

Dakota Frampton, 4, of Easton with pumpkins to take to checkout at the festival at Butler's Orchard in Germantown.

Thousands of people embarked on an autumnal annual rite and trekked to pumpkin patches to search for a perfectly rotund — or delightfully deformed — pumpkin.

Unlike pumpkin crops in New England, which were damaged by heavy summer rains, the pumpkins in Montgomery County fared well and are ripe for the picking. But pumpkins in other Maryland communities did not fare as well, said Michael Newell, horticultural crops program manager at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"People always like to panic about pumpkins," said Todd Butler, the farm store manager at Butler's Orchard. "We always have pumpkins here."

The first official day of fall was Sept. 22.

Donna Woody of Darnestown visited Butler's Orchard on Friday to buy some apple cider and a pumpkin for her front porch. The orchard offers the 29th Annual Pumpkin Festival on weekends through Nov. 1.

Woody enjoys the change of the seasons, especially the change of the leaves and pumpkins.

"This is the best time of year and nothing says fall like a pumpkin," she said.

Children and adults slid down a large slide, picked pumpkins and enjoyed hay rides and apple cider, Butler said.

"The fall season in general is our busiest time of the year," he said. "It's a great time of year, just a bit busier."

As some pumpkin crops in New England were washed away by heavy rains in June and July, Butler said he wasn't worried.

"If anything, after all that rain, it turned dry," Butler said. The dry weather left some pumpkins small.

"When the ground dries up, the plant shuts down," he said. "It worries about surviving not about getting bigger."

Heavy rain can cause devastating plant diseases that could cause plants to rot and could ruin entire crops, Newell said. A combination of high temperatures, heavy rains and clouds in June and July, ruined some pumpkin and other fruit crops around the state, he said.

Michael Heyser, owner of Heyser Farms in Silver Spring, said he knows of pumpkin planters in Maryland who had some of their earlier crops washed out. Those people, he said, "planted their crops between mid and late May."

Some of his pumpkins were victim to heavy rains, but he replanted them after the heavy rains left the area, he said.

"Our pumpkin crop this year actually turned out pretty good," Heyser said. "Actually, it's better than last year because we had some moisture in the soil."